1

Living in a Promiseland?1:

Mexican Immigration and American Obligations

Rogers M. Smith

The triggers for these reflections are the controversies over immigration that roiled

American politics in the summer of 2010 and that continued with the opening of the new

Congress in January 2011, though the arguments here are also applicable to many other

immigrant-receiving countries. The recent American immigration disputes have involved

tensions not just between proponents of different policies but also champions of the

prerogatives of different governments, national, state, and local. They include clashes

between the government of the United States and government of the State of Arizona and

between both those governments and some county and municipal agencies, and they

involve the relationship between the governments of the United States of America and

the United Mexican States, as well as relationships between American and Mexican state

and municipal governments on opposing sides of their long national border.

While emotions toward Islam contributed to recent American immigration concerns,

and Mexico has few Muslims, Latino immigrants generally, and Mexican immigrants in

particular, have for some time been at the heart of immigration issues in the U.S. Over

half of America’s current foreign-born residents are Latinos from Central and South

America. Over 30% are from Mexico. Mexicans are also estimated to comprise 57% of

the nation’s undocumented foreign-born population.2 Consonant with these figures, the

recent concerns about immigration that have contorted American politics and policies

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have chiefly been worries about Latino immigrants, and especially anxieties about

Mexican immigrants.

I have previously argued that one criterion for determining how the United States

government should treat non-citizens is a “principle of constituted identities.”3 It holds

that the greater the degree to which the U.S. has coercively constituted the identities of

non-citizens in ways that have made having certain relationships to America fundamental

to their capacities to lead free and meaningful lives, the greater the obligations the U.S.

has to facilitate those relationships—though other conflicting obligations may still prove

overriding and determine policies. I have also suggested that this principle implies that

Mexicans may be owed “special access to American residency and citizenship, ahead of

the residents of the many countries less affected by U.S. policies, and in ways that should

justify leniency toward undocumented Mexican immigrants.”4

Here I elaborate but also qualify that suggestion. I seek to take into account the

interests and aspirations represented by American state and local governments who are

recipients of Mexican immigration, particularly Arizona; the interests and aspirations

represented by the Mexican national government; and the interests and aspirations of

Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Americans more generally. I contend that both

Americans such as those Arizonans who feel burdened by nationally imposed

immigration policies, and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who wish to have practical

and perhaps official dual nationality, have both had their identities, values, and interests

shaped by coercively enforced U.S. policies. As a result, even though they have

conflicting interests and aspirations, both groups have legitimate claims that the U.S.

government is obligated to accommodate as much as it can. I conclude by sketching

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some of the inevitably compromised policies that might respond appropriately to these

clashing imperatives.

I. The Current Conflicts. On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed

into law Senate Bill 1070, the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods

Act.”5 Its proponents presented the bill as a means to insure that all Arizona governments

and agencies would actively contribute to enforcement of federal immigration laws,

rather than abstaining from or even obstructing enforcement, as state legislators believed

some local officials were doing. Among other provisions, the bill required all cities to

aid immigration enforcement, first by collecting and reporting information on immigrant

statuses to pertinent federal agencies, and second by requesting status information from

federal immigration authorities. The law also added state penalties for violations of some

federal immigration laws and for the commission of various immigration-related crimes.

Most controversially, it authorized Arizona law officers to require persons to give proof

of their immigration status whenever the officials had “reasonable suspicion” of

illegality. Officials could also arrest immigration law violators without warrants, so long

as police had “probable cause” to believe them guilty of such violations.

The Obama Justice Department immediately challenged the law on the grounds that it

represented state interference with national policies concerning the enforcement of

immigration laws, and because it might encourage stops, searches, and arrests on the

basis of suspicions that amounted to illegal racial profiling. The President of Mexico,

Felipe Calderón, and other Mexican officials also condemned the law, calling it a

“violation of human rights.”6 On April 30th, the Arizona legislature enacted and the

Governor signed a further measure guaranteeing that state prosecutors would not

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investigate complaints based on “race, color, or national origin.” But on July 28, 2010, a

day before SB 1070 was to go into effect, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton nonetheless

issued a preliminary injunction against its authorizations to demand proof of status and to

arrest without warrants, though she allowed most of the law to go into effect.7 Arizona is

appealed her ruling before a 9th Circuit panel. Oral arguments were held on November 1,

2010. At this writing a decision is pending.8

Two related developments during the summer of 2010 merit notice. On May 12, less

than three weeks after enacting SB 1070, the Arizona legislature passed and Governor

Brewer signed HB 2281, which banned Arizona school districts and charter schools from

offering classes or courses that were “designed primarily for students of a particular

ethnic group” or that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as

individuals.”9 The State Superintendent of Public Instruction said the bill was primarily

aimed at ending the Chicano studies program in the Tucson schools, and on January 4th,

2011, his successor took steps to do so.10 The law carried further the educational goals of

the Arizona voters who gave overwhelming approval in 2000 to Proposition 203, which

abolished bilingual education and replaced it with English-immersion classes. Similarly,

SB 1070 extended earlier Arizona measures against undocumented immigrants, including

Proposition 200, the Arizona Taxpayer and Citizenship Protection Act, which required

proof of citizenship to vote and obtain public benefits, and the 2007 Legal Arizona

Workers Act, which prohibits businesses from hiring undocumented workers but has

been only sporadically enforced.11

Also in summer 2010, many prominent Republicans including Senator Lindsey

Graham of Florida and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah endorsed either an amendment to the

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14th Amendment to deny automatic citizenship to children of undocumented aliens born

on U.S. soil, or legislation to achieve that end, a step that a few scholars (including me in

1985) have argued to be permissible under the existing 14th Amendment.12 Then as a

new Congress with a Republican House took its seats on January 5, 2011, a group called

“State Legislators for Legal Immigration” proposed state laws declaring that children of

undocumented aliens were not citizens and requiring their states to issue distinct birth

certificates for those children. Representative Steven King of Iowa also promised to

introduce a bill eliminating birthright citizenship for children when both parents were

illegal immigrants.13 Although the chances of his measure being enacted either by statute

or amendment are nil, and the courts are unlikely to uphold the state legislators’ laws,

these proposals, along with the Arizona legislation and litigation, have kept immigration

disputes near the forefront of American politics.

Even as many American lawmakers have been worrying more and more about

undocumented immigrants, predominantly from Mexico, the government of the United

Mexican States has in the last fifteen years taken two major steps to maintain its

affiliation with its nationals who go abroad, particularly to the United States. In 1996,

Mexico’s governments ratified several constitutional amendments that permitted

Mexicans to hold both foreign citizenship and Mexican nationality. The amendments’

chief impacts were to allow Mexicans resident in other countries to naturalize there while

still retaining their rights to own land in Mexico, to own Mexican businesses and stocks,

and to transmit their Mexican property to their heirs—including children born abroad,

who now automatically possess Mexican nationality without having to renounce all other

citizenships, as formerly required.14

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Mexican law retained, however, a distinction between Mexican nationality and

citizenship, and it confined voting rights to citizens, while treating Mexicans resident in

other countries simply as nationals. Then in 2005, Mexico amended its constitution again

to permit Mexicans living abroad who had obtained voter registration cards in Mexico

and who mailed in ballots to have their votes counted in presidential elections. Efforts to

permit Mexicans to register to vote entirely outside the country, to vote by other means,

and to conduct campaigns in other countries met defeat.15 The attempts to expand the

voting rights of non-resident Mexicans continue today, particularly on behalf of

Mexicans resident in the United States. Even if these movements do not succeed, the

Mexican national government has already shown great willingness to accommodate

people with Mexican origins who wish to be members of both the U.S. and the Mexican

economic, political, and cultural communities.

II. The Aspirations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. As numerous scholars in

several disciplines have documented, especially in the last quarter-century, such wishes

to be culturally, economically, and sometimes politically both American and Mexican—

rather than simply U.S. citizens—have long been expressed by many, though by no

means all, persons of Mexican descent born on both sides of the border. In 1985, for

example, political historian Mario García noted that after the United States took much of

what is now the American southwest from Mexico consequent to its victory in the

Mexican-American War, “nineteenth-century Mexicans reacted in different ways. Some

refused to submit to conquest and defended themselves against Anglo control. Others,

however, accommodated themselves to the transformation. Nevertheless, both groups

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maintained a Mexican cultural, political, and economic presence until reinforced by

extensive Mexican immigration” in the first third of the 20th century.16

García then identified the conceptions of Mexican-American identity expressed in

three southern California Mexican-American newspapers from the 1920s through the

1970s. La Opiníon in the 1920s accepted the loss of Mexican lands to the U.S. but

insisted that Mexicans in the U.S. remained “an organic part of Mexico” who should see

themselves as serving their patria by learning skills and gaining income they could

contribute upon returning home—and who should therefore not become U.S. citizens.17

From the 1930s to the 1960s, El Espectador instead supported “a modified form of

Mexican-American nationalism…the integration of Mexicans into the mainstream of

American society, but not at the expense of cultural heritage.”18 Mexican Americans and

Mexican immigrants should instead embrace “a type of dual cultural citizenship.”19 Then

in the 1960s and 1970s, Sin Fronteras (Without Borders) argued that Mexicans both north

and south of the border were victims of “Yankee political, economic, and cultural

colonialism,” denounced immigration restrictions, and dreamed of establishing a “greater

Mexican workers’ state” built from “Mexican workers on both sides of the border.”20

Despite their differences, all three positions claimed legitimate residence for many

persons of Mexican descent on what was officially U.S. soil, while also insisting on the

legitimacy of their identification with Mexicans south of the border.

Subsequently, political anthropologist Leo Chavez combined ethnographic research,

interviews, and regression analyses of opinion surveys to argue that undocumented

Latino immigrants “can have multiple identities; they can imagine themselves to be part

of their communities ‘back home,’ and they can also imagine places for themselves in

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their ‘new,’ or host, communities.”21 Chavez also contended that “history, social

relationships, and economic structures” have expanded Mexicans’ conceptions of “where

they may legitimately work…Their possible labor market includes places in the United

States where they (or a relative or friend) have worked before. The political border

between Mexico and the United States does not limit this expanded concept.”22

Political scientists concur. In 2003, William V. Flores insisted that even after the

fading of the socialist Chicano radicalism of the late 1960s and 1970s represented by Sin

Fronteras, both undocumented and legally resident Latinos in the U.S. were continuing to

reject “the artificial boundaries established by the state to distinguish between citizens

and noncitizens” through “a counterideology that stresses Latino unity” and “cultural

citizenship.”23 Flores maintained, however, that the society “the Latinos envision may be

more like the ideal America than the America that exists,” in that it is “committed to

values of democracy and social justice.” As a result, while “Latinos may not fully belong

to America, their hopes and frustrations do.”24

In a major new collaborative study, Luis Fraga, John Garcia, Rodney Hero, Michael

Jones-Correa, Valerie Martinez-Evers and Gary M. Segura concur. They conclude that

“Latinos have the same long-term goals as other Americans in similar socioeconomic

circumstances” and in fact “remain more optimistic about their prospects for achieving

their ‘Americano dream’ than their American counterparts.” Most are “willing to take

difficult steps to achieve these goals, including ‘adapting’ so as to better fit into

American society,” even as they “strive to maintain their distinct cultural and language

traditions.”25 The authors also note that “Latinos simultaneously hold multiple identities”

and also have social network that are in many cases based on country of origin; but they

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also perceive “an equally meaningful and vibrant pan-ethnic identity” among “most

Latinos” that “is increasingly self-conscious, crosses nationalities, and is politically

relevant.”26 Even so, variations within and across different national-origin Latino groups

mean that efforts to mobilize Latinos on the basis of shared ethnic identities and interests

remain both philosophically and politically problematic.27

These studies confirm that, although not all persons of Mexican descent living on

either side of the border hope to build lives that belong to, that benefit from, and that

shape both the United States and Mexico, many do. Those aspirations are what the

Mexican government has sought to facilitate. In many regards, they are also what the

Arizona government has sought to obstruct. The fact that Arizona has legislated not only

against what it views as illegitimate economic and political actions by undocumented

aliens, but also against educational curricula designed to support “dual cultural

citizenship,” shows that the concerns of the state’s governing officials and the majority of

its electorate extend beyond simply opposition to the presence of persons in violation of

U.S. immigration laws. The Arizona government is opposed to the kinds of cultural,

economic, and political dual citizenships that the Mexican government is encouraging

and that many Mexican Americans as well as many Mexicans endorse.

What, if any, are the obligations of the government of the United States in relation to

the opposed goals of these two governments, in relation to the Mexicans and Mexican

Americans who favor these kinds of dual nationality, and in relation to other Americans

who do not? Those are questions to which there are no easy answers.

III. The Principle of Coercively Constituted Identities. The principle that I offer as a

partial guide to defining the obligations of all the governments involved—though here I

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focus on the U.S. government—builds on the premise that political communities are

forged and sustained in part through what I have termed “ethically constitutive stories of

peoplehood,” stories expressing dominant views of the normative purposes and worth of

those memberships. 28 It relies also on Will Kymlicka’s claim that persons can only have

“meaningful” choices within the frameworks of the (usually multiple and complex)

cultural contexts and narratives that have partly constituted their identities and values.29

The first step in my argument is the contention that members of political communities

generally feel and should feel senses of obligation, varying in strength, to live up to the

demands of their “ethically constitutive” stories.30 Next, I presume that the “ethically

constitutive stories” advanced by the United States government, the Arizona government,

the Mexican government, and the other governments involved in immigration

controversies all express foundational commitments to respecting and advancing human

dignity, rights, and freedoms. And even though these governments and their

communities display many different understandings within them and between them

concerning what those very general commitments mean, all would accept that insofar as

possible, government policies should aid rather than hinder persons seeking to pursue

lives those persons feel to be meaningful expressions of their identities, values, and

aspirations. Finally, if we agree with Kymlicka that most people can lead meaningful

lives only within the cultural contexts that have partly constituted those identities, values,

and aspirations, and if we recognize that governments have often used their coercive

powers to structure the cultural context and narratives that play these constitutive roles in

people’s lives, then governments committed to dignity, rights, and freedom have a prima

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facie obligation to help the persons whose aspirations they have coercively shaped to

realize those aspirations.

This obligation has limits. All these governments have traditionally officially held,

for understandable reasons, that they have special duties to their own citizens, from

whom their authority derives, obligations that generally merit priority over any

obligations to non-citizens. But whether or not this priority is justified, as I think it

generally is, most agree that governments that honor human rights and dignity have to

acknowledge some duties to human beings outside their officially delineated community.

Here I am suggesting that their own values imply that modern constitutional democracies

must recognize special obligations to all persons who are who they are, and who have the

values and aspirations they do, partly because their identities have been constituted by the

governments’ coercive measures--whether or not those persons are currently legally

citizens. It seems undeniable that when governments impose a particular range of

educational systems, religious practices, economic systems, marital and familial

structures, forms of expression, and systems of governance on populations, punishing

those who seek to live in ways outside that range, rewarding those who live as the

governments wish, the governments shape if they do not indeed constitute the core

values, affiliations, and senses of self of many in those populations. We should also

expect that many of the people coercively shaped in these ways will feel they can best

lead meaningful lives, or can only lead meaningful lives, if they pursue cultural, social,

economic, and political endeavors that reflect their mandated forms of socialization—in

some cases complying with those forms of socialization, in some cases seeking to adapt

or resist them. And just as parents have responsibilities to and for their children,

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governments should acknowledge that they have responsibilities to and for those they

have helped bring into being as persons with particular dreams and prospects.31 In sum,

governments that are committed to respecting and assisting persons’ aspirations to lead

free and fulfilling lives, and who have exercised their coercive power to make those

persons’ aspirations what they are, have special duties to help them pursue their preferred

ways of life, insofar as the governments can do so, consistent with their capacities and

their other obligations.

Or so I contend. There are many plausible objections to this claim. None is more

potent than the worry that, likely many abstract moral principles, it provides no practical

guidance for real-world dilemmas and is in any case politically a non-starter. Here I seek

to show the contrary by considering the principle’s implications for the U.S.

government’s responsibilities to, in particular, Arizona and other immigrant-receiving

American states and all their citizens, including Mexican Americans, as well as to

Mexican nationals. Stated in what may seem an appropriate nutshell, those implications

are that the U.S. should join the Mexican government in facilitating quests for form of

dual nationality or dual economic and cultural citizenship, rather than reinforcing state

and local governments like Arizona’s that seek to reduce the presence of dual nationals,

especially Mexicans.

Making this case involves attention to how the U.S. government has in the past as

well as the present contributed coercively to the identities, affiliations, hopes and dreams

of the populations involved in current immigration disputes. But the argument is not a

call to rectify or make reparations for past policies. It does not seek to assess the costs of

any harms done to those the U.S. has coercively shaped or to restore them to the

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condition they might have had without those actions. Nor does it turn on the legitimacy

of their claims for the lands, resources, institutions and ways of life that they or their

ancestors held prior to the U.S. government’s coercive actions. It rests simply on the

reality that the U.S. government has coercively shaped their identities, aspirations, and

opportunities into what they are.32 It is this coercive constituting that makes it imperative

for the U.S. to discern how, in regard to these persons, its core commitments to

respecting and advancing human dignity, rights, and freedom in general, with special

responsibilities to some, can be best fulfilled now and in the years ahead.

IV. The Role of Governments in Coercively Constituting “Anglo-Americans,”

“Mexican-Americans,” and Mexicans. This is not the place for a comprehensive account

of how the policies of the United States, the states along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the

Mexican government have all contributed to the constituting of the identities of the

communities involved in current controversies. Along with others, I have previously

argued that in the Jacksonian era, aggressive American westward expansion justified

partly in terms of ideologies of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority as well as the nation’s

providential “Manifest Destiny” precipitated mounting conflicts with Mexico.33 Having

provoked a Mexican attack on U.S. forces seeking to occupy disputed territory, desiring

land, and concerned in part about the impact on southern slavery of Mexico’s recent

abolition of the institution, the U.S. government finally declared war on Mexico in May,

1846. U.S. military forces went on to defeat Mexican armies and to occupy Mexico City.

On February 2, 1848, the war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

It forfeited Mexico’s claim to Texas and, in return for $15 million, transferred northwest

Mexico, including what is now California, Nevada and Utah and parts of Arizona, New

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Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming to the United States, giving up roughly half of

Mexico’s lands, though lands thinly occupied by a small percentage of its population.34

Apart from the indigenous tribes within its modern borders and the territories acquired in

the Spanish-American war, whose inhabitants have since been made U.S. nationals or

citizens by various statutes, there is no other nation in the world that has been coercively

compelled to surrender so large a percentage of its territory to the United States.

The Treaty gave Mexican residents of the transferred lands who chose to remain the

option of obtaining U.S. citizenship. Virtually all the estimate 75,000 who stayed did

so.35 But as the 19th and then the early 20th centuries proceeded, persons of Latino

descent increasingly found themselves subjected to a wide range of discriminations by

U.S. territorial and then state governments throughout the region. Prior to the Civil War,

California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas adopted constitutions that confined voting

rights and jury service to white men, though New Mexico permitted Pueblo Indians to

vote until Congress changed the policy in 1853.36 Many new Mexican Americans were

of mixed race ancestry and were deemed non-white, especially poor farmers and laborers.

Most soon found themselves governed by officials, policed by state and local

enforcement officials, and tried by courts with limited commitments to equal treatment.

Over time many Mexican Americans responded with various forms of what scholars term

“resistant adaptation”--acceptance of certain forms of assimilation in return for economic

opportunities and somewhat broader rights, while refusing to accept fully the identities

and statuses imposed by the American territorial and then state governments upon most

persons of Mexican descent.37

15

And though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed that property rights of

Mexicans in the transferred territories would be upheld, particular claims had to be

adjudicated in American courts. They often proved unreceptive to the limited

documentation many Mexicans could offer, even as state governments sometimes

legislated in favor of squatter rights, actively encouraging whites to occupy Mexican-

owned lands.38 The resulting trends toward loss of Mexican lands gained powerful

reinforcement from the late 19th century development policies of the Mexican

government under the dictatorial President Porfirio Díaz, and the United States during its

corporate-dominated “Gilded Age.” Through various means, these governments took

control of lands held by indigenous tribes, churches, and many small farmers in order to

assist the expansion of largely U.S.-owned railroads and mining companies on both sides

of the border. U.S. agencies also created irrigation systems that made large-scale

commercial farms profitable in the southwest.39 The results were that by 1890, almost all

Mexicans in the American southwest had lost their land, along with innumerable small

farmers throughout Mexico. Many of those farmers moved to northern Mexico and then

across the border seeking employment in the fast-expanding railroads, mines, commercial

farms, and in the cities beginning to grow, especially El Paso and San Antonio in Texas

and Los Angeles in California. Many eventually brought their families along—though

they often did so without any sense that they were forever leaving Mexico.40

The significance of this history is that the U.S. government, American territorial and

state governments, and the Mexican government all used their coercive authority in the

late 19th and early 20th century in ways that displaced substantial populations from their

former lands and homes and made them eager to gain better economic opportunities in

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the United States, even though they still felt strong links to and identifications with

Mexico and its territories, language and cultural traditions. The U.S. and the

southwestern state governments generally welcomed the labor of these immigrants, yet

they also discriminated against, especially, poorer Mexican immigrants and Mexican

Americans. In Arizona, in particular, the role of the U.S. government was striking and

consequential. These discriminations formed part of the heightened embrace of

evolution-based doctrines of racial superiority that characterized not only the late 19th

Century Gilded Age but also the American Progressive era.41

In the earl 1900s, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Indiana

Senator Albert Beveridge, later a leader of the Progressive Party and always a leading

proponent of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, opposed statehood for New Mexico and Arizona

due to their Mexican-descended populations. The 15th Amendment had abolished

explicit racial restrictions on the franchise in 1870. But to gain admission to the Union,

the Arizona territorial assembly imposed a $2.50 poll tax and then an English literacy test

for voting in the early 1900s, effectively disfranchising poorer and less educated Mexican

Americans. The Arizona state constitution then added a ban on voting by those “under

guardianship,” which was used to disfranchise many with both tribal and Hispanic

origins. And in 1912, the new state legislature also required voters to be able to “read the

Constitution of the United States in the English language” well enough to show they were

not doing so from memory.42

The United States thus used its power over admission to the Union to prompt, if not

indeed compel, “whiter” and more prosperous Arizonans to see themselves as the proper

governors of their state because of their racial, cultural, and class identities and to act

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accordingly, or else remain territorial residents and so less than full citizens themselves.

In the era of when U.S. government agencies and courts explicitly denied that the former

Spanish colonies acquired in the Spanish-American war were racially and culturally fit to

be fully “incorporated” into the United States, the northern European descended

Americans in other states also felt authorized to enact similar restrictions on their

residents with Mexican ancestry.43

In the first half of the 20th century, most of the southwestern states did so. They used

various means--sometimes explicit Jim Crow segregation laws, sometimes restrictive

covenants, sometimes police harassment, sometimes deportation—to impose segregated

schooling, housing, and restricted economic and political rights and opportunities on

Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants who were deemed non-white. Predictably,

many Mexican Americans resisted. Others responded by distancing themselves from

African-Americans and espousing both the superiority of the white race and their

membership within it—thereby strengthening the beliefs of all “whites” that they

deserved their superior statuses. Some Mexican Americans in fact opposed further

Mexican immigration, particularly undocumented immigration, seeing it as a source of

their own stigmatization.44 These political circumstances helped make possible various

guest worker arrangements, including the Bracero program begun in 1942, through which

U.S. employers hired Mexican laborers when needed, but subjected them to harsh

discriminations. The U.S. then deported the laborers—and sometimes their American-

born children and other Mexican-American citizens—whenever job markets dried up.45

In the second half of the 20th century, many consequences of these past governmental

policies continued. Anti-Mexican educational and residential segregation and economic

18

discrimination persisted even in more prosperous regions like northern California, as did

divisions among Mexican Americans over how to respond, even though most embraced

both American and Mexican identities in one way or another. 46 But the triumphs of the

modern African American civil rights movement; the forms of political and cultural

consciousness stirred by the related Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s; the

expanded protections against bars to voting affecting Mexican Americans provided by

the 1965 Voting Rights Act and particularly its 1975 amendments; and the rise of modern

multiculturalism, all worked to limit public and private discrimination against Mexican

Americans and Mexican immigrants and to encourage renewed, widespread senses of

transnational Mexican American dual “cultural citizenships.”47 Under pressure from

allied civil rights and labor forces, Congress also ended the Bracero program in 1963.48

The symbolic affirmations and public policies designed to promote equal rights and to

facilitate many forms of cultural diversity that the U.S. government and many state and

local governments established in the Sixties and Seventies are also important ways that

they have used their power and authority to constitute persons’ values and aspirations--

now more inclusive.

Yet after the 1965 Immigration Act, both documented and undocumented Mexican

immigration grew, planting the seeds of current immigration controversies. A major

effort at comprehensive immigration reform in 1986 that sought to stem the influx of

undocumented immigrants while granting amnesty to millions already present in the U.S.,

and modifications of those reforms in 1990, increased legal immigration from less-

represented countries while failing to reduce undocumented entries, still overwhelmingly

Mexicans.49 Though policy analysts dispute the relative amounts, most agree that the

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costs of providing social services to immigrants, documented and undocumented, have

since grown. These costs have fallen mostly on the state and local governments in the

areas where immigrants are concentrated, even as the federal government benefits from

immigrants’ taxes and the national economy in general gains from immigrant labor.50

The decisions of the U.S. and Mexican governments as well as the Canadian

government to join in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 only

accelerated the movement of persons as well as goods across, especially, the U.S.-

Mexican border.51 In the 1990s, some immigrant receiving states, particularly those in

which “Anglo” majorities confronted substantial minority populations, responded by

adopting their own measures to reduce immigration, in the manner of Arizona; but these

measures too have had little impact.52 And as the decisions of the Arizona state

legislators to require that all the state’s municipalities cooperate in immigration

enforcement reveal, even within those states, some local governments and agencies have

resisted efforts to “crack down” on undocumented immigrants, while others have

enthusiastically cooperated.

In 1996, the U.S. government whose policies had done so much to generate

contemporary immigration and to combat various forms of discrimination, began instead

to reduce immigrant rights once again, particularly social welfare entitlements and

procedural protections against deportation. Congress also encouraged and in some

regards compelled the states to follow suit. In June of 1996, it passed the Antiterrorism

and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). It expedited the exclusion and arrest,

punishment, and removal of those suspected of being alien terrorists or criminals by

authorizing a special removal court, limiting judicial review of deportations, speeding up

20

the timetable for deportation processes, limiting the discretion of the Attorney General to

admit or grant asylum to suspect aliens, and making many immigration law offenses

subject to the expansive punitive measures authorized by RICO (the Racketeer

Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act). Its section 439 also authorized state and local

officials to assist the federal government in these endeavors.53

In August, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work

Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), ending the Aid to Families with Dependent

Children (AFDC) program established in the original New Deal Social Security Act and

replacing it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grants to the

states. The law also made immigrants arriving after its enactment ineligible for all

federally funded means-tested benefit programs like TANF and Medicaid for five years,

restrictions states had to enforce, though they had the option to include immigrants after

the five year period. And the act denied new immigrants Supplemental Security Income

(SSI) and food stamps altogether, though they could regain eligibility by naturalizing.54

In September 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility

Act (IIRIRA) increased resources for immigration law enforcement, including detentions;

further streamlined procedures to expedite exclusions and deportations; further limited

the Attorney General’s discretionary authority to grant entry to the needy via “parole;”

banned Social Security benefits for undocumented aliens; authorized states to limit public

assistance to aliens; mandated new data-collection on aliens, including requirements that

educational institutions report on their foreign students; and authorized heightened

worksite investigations, among other measures. Its sections 133 and 372 specifically

empowered states to play larger roles in immigration law enforcement.55

21

Consequently, when the Arizona legislature passed its recent measures requiring

evidence of citizenship to vote, barring cities from granting undocumented aliens any

public benefits and requiring their assistance in immigration enforcement, and

authorizing police to stop and arrest persons suspected of being in the country illegally, it

could and did claim it was seeking to comply more fully with federal laws that were

failing to achieve their objectives, not interfering with federal policies. Again, the fact

the legislature also banned Ethnic Studies classes indicates that their concerns went

beyond removing illegal aliens from their state. Yet it must also be acknowledged that

they were expressing ethnocultural notions of who should be an Arizonan and a U.S.

resident that the U.S. government had actively fostered in the past and had arguably

appeared recently to express again.

V. Toward Appropriate Policies and an Enabling Politics. Even if, as I contend, this

history provides grounds for recognizing that the U.S. government has special obligations

to Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a result of the ways it has coercively constituted

their identities, values, and aspirations, the U.S. also has special obligations to other

members of its states, local governments, and citizenry. Finding policies that can meet

these obligations effectively, and building political support to enact them, are the real

challenges. But quests to define those policies and win endorsements of them may be

aided by recognition of the responsibilities they should seek to fulfill.

To summarize the “special obligations” case: by coercively taking the lands that

many Mexicans inhabited, the United States created a population in what was now its

southwest who had no choice but to accept U.S. authority and some form of membership

in its community if they wished to continue to live their lives where they resided. The

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U.S. and Mexican governments then both mandated forms of economic development that

cost many mestizo Mexicans and Mexican Americans their farms and left them with

labor for U.S.-owned production, transportation, and agricultural enterprises, on both

sides of the border, as their best economic opportunities. But the U.S. territorial

governments also adopted mandatory policies that provided these Mexican and Mexican

American workers with restricted political, legal, residential, educational, and economic

rights and opportunities. And, most strikingly in the case of Arizona, the U.S.

government actively pressured the “Anglo” citizens of those regions to create states that

did the same. Those patterns persisted through much of the 20th century, even as the

national government began mandating an end to many forms of discrimination and

encouraging various kinds of cultural accommodations, and even as its immigration and

trade policies produced national revenues and economic benefits while generating social

policy costs that fell most heavily on the immigrant-receiving states and locales.

It is perfectly understandable, if it is not indeed inevitable, that these past and present

policies have generated large numbers of persons who in various ways feel themselves to

be dual nationals—who value the economic opportunities available in the U.S., who

endorse many official American values of human rights, social mobility earned through

work, and democratic self-determination, but who also feel themselves to be part of

Mexican cultural traditions and communities. Many see themselves as effectively

compelled to seek homes and jobs in the United States and they wish to be productive,

contributing residents, but they also wish to maintain as much of their Mexican cultural

identities and to maintain as close ties to their relatives and ancestral regions in Mexico

as possible. They see and feel in these ways in significant measure because that is how

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U.S. policies, along with Mexican ones, have constructed their experiences in the world.

In recent years the Mexican government, for reasons of perhaps enlightened self-interest,

has responded by making adoption of formal dual citizenship more feasible and by

protesting U.S. and American state actions against Mexican immigrants. The United

States government is if anything more obligated to do the same.

But at the same time, the U.S. government has also used its power to shape the

identities, values, interests, and policies of the southwestern and western states and their

officially “white” citizens. It long fostered beliefs that those states needed to be governed

primarily by whites, even as its immigration and economic policies fostered (and

continue to foster) the presence of many poorer Mexican and Mexican American laborers

in those states. The resulting political tensions and social policy burdens must be seen as

in part things the U.S. government has coercively imposed on these citizens and states,

through the same actions that have produced Mexicans and Mexican Americans with

aspirations for various forms of dual political, economic, and cultural citizenship. If the

U.S. has obligations that point toward facilitating these dual citizenships, then, it also has

obligations to its states and localities and their citizens to help them resolve the economic

and political challenges that such facilitation generates.

What policies might best respond to these conflicting imperatives? The United

States, like most modern nations, has structured its immigration priorities

overwhelmingly in terms of the perceived interests of its current citizens. Since 1965,

American policymakers have decided this means giving priority to immediate family

members, a criterion that has facilitated Mexican immigration, and to persons with

economically valuable skills, a criterion that has usually favored the highly educated and

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technically skilled, not most Mexican applicants for immigration. The U.S. also imposes

a somewhat flexible overall cap on legal immigration that limits the numbers admitted

under both criteria. It caps the immigration that can come from any individual country

as well: none can receive visas in numbers exceeding 7% of the total permissible family-

sponsored and employment-based entries. That currently means 25,620.56 Nations with

large number of applicants that can meet family-sponsorship and employment criteria

quickly hit their caps—especially Mexico—and collectively fill up the overall

permissible visa numbers. Other nations with few recent immigrants to the U.S. or

skilled applicants often fail to reach their caps.

All these immigration priorities, like the claim that the United States has some special

obligations to Mexicans and Mexican Americans, are legitimately controversial—

because there are reasonable arguments both for and against them that turn on a large

number of empirical and normative considerations. The U.S. needs a comprehensive set

of policies governing immigration and immigrants that balances competing claims via

policies that can be both effective and politically sustainable; but discerning that set of

policies is a huge task. Here I simply suggest some ways that the U.S. obligations I have

delineated here might play into policy-making.

Precisely because U.S. policies have done so much to make Mexicans the most

numerous sources of both legal and illegal immigrants to the U.S., the U.S. has strong

reasons to give explicit priority to Mexicans in the legal immigration queues. One way

to do so would be to allocate a substantially larger number of visas of all kinds to

Mexicans, abandoning the policy of applying the same cap to all countries, regardless of

their past and present relationships to the U.S. or their numbers of applicants. This might

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be done without raising the overall immigration ceiling or otherwise altering immigration

categories—though raising the overall immigration cap would increase Mexican legal

immigration even more, as would changes in employment priorities to provide more visas

for employable but less skilled immigrants.

Whether permitting more Mexican legal immigrants in any of these ways would

reduce the number of Mexican illegal immigrants can be disputed, just as it is debatable

whether denying birthright citizenship to children of illegal aliens would decrease or

increase the illegal alien population over time. History gives ample evidence that the

consequences of immigration policies are often unpredictable. The arguments for special

obligations to Mexicans made here also inescapably imply special consideration for

undocumented Mexicans already in the United States, probably including some viable

paths to citizenship for those not guilty of any illegal activities except undocumented

presence. But what those paths should be, given the meritorious claims of legal

applicants for immigration and naturalization including other Mexicans, is

philosophically and politically hard to establish. To give preference in immigration

policies to Mexicans who have entered illegally over applicants from other countries who

have followed legal processes would admittedly be far from perfectly fair. Yet doing so

would bring the United States’ official immigration policies more in line with what its

actual immigration policies have been and are likely to remain, in ways that would

recognize the special status of Mexican applicants that the U.S. has coercively created.

Similarly, the U.S. has a special obligation to facilitate the adoption of official and

practical forms of dual Mexican-American political, economic, and cultural citizenship,

as the Mexican national government has done, since it has done so much to constitute

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populations who have trouble conceiving of themselves as otherwise having meaningful

identities and lives. The U.S. is officially already receptive to dual political citizenship,

despite the language of its naturalization oath.57 But its policies toward immigrants stand

in striking and growing contrast to Canada’s, in ways that Irene Bloemraad has found to

be associated with much lower naturalization rates in the U.S.58 Canada offers

immigrants courses designed to aid general language acquisition as well as language

skills needed specifically in the labor market; job counseling and training; a Host

program that links new immigrants with resident volunteers who can help with initial

settlements; and it funds community organizations to provide a range of services for

immigrants including orientation, translation, interpretation, referrals to community

resources, and para-professional legal and medical advice. It also gives grants to

immigrant ethnic associations, funds for ethnic studies programs and the writing of ethic

histories, and it aids heritage language programs and other immigrant cultural activities.59

Establishing such initiatives and requiring state and local governments to assist in

them would, however, further compound the economic, political, and social pressures

generated in the major immigrant-receiving states by the Mexican immigration the U.S.

has fostered. The United States therefore has obligations to help alleviate those

pressures. For both political and policy reasons, it is likely that any measures to

encourage increased legal Mexican immigration must be accompanied by credible efforts

to enforce effectively the immigration limits that remain, such as heightened border

patrols and more stringent employer sanctions. The U.S. government and taxpayers

across the nation should also assume the lion’s share of the costs of all immigrant

settlement and assistance and social benefit programs, as well as enforcement measures

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and other policies affecting immigrants, rather than shifting many of those burdens to the

states, as happened in 1996. The United States should also require that immigrant

workers receive wage and working conditions that match those provided to native

employees, as the Obama administration is urging, while trying to find more ways to

generate greater economic opportunities and improved working conditions in Mexico,

reducing economically-driven immigration to whatever degree proves possible.

Are these suggestions politically utopian? Perhaps; they certainly require the creation

of favorable coalitions that do not currently exist. Yet there is more in place on which to

build than may first meet the eye. Although the United States has powerful political

traditions that support opposition to immigrants, especially those perceived as

undesirable non-whites, it also has traditions that celebrate America as a haven for all

immigrants, including ones in need. The Anglo-authored 1986 hit song invoked in the

title of this essay, “Living in the Promiseland,” is a reminder that many Americans of all

backgrounds can be moved by those traditions of immigrant receptivity. So is a 2009

resolution of the theologically and often politically conservative National Association of

Evangelicals. Noting that immigrants “are made in the image of God and have supreme

value with the potential to contribute greatly to society,” the resolution urged that “the

government recognize the central importance of the family in society by reconsidering

the number and categories of visas available for family reunification,” #establish a sound,

equitable process toward earned legal status for currently undocumented immigrants,”

and “legislate fair labor and civil laws for all residing within the United States.”

Although the NAE did not address Mexican immigration in particular, its resolution

invoking biblical traditions of “grace to the foreigner” praised the “positive impact of

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multiple cultures on national life,” and both family reunification and pathways to legal

status for the undocumented would disproportionately benefit Mexicans.60

More prosaically, today’s Latino organizations are both more pro-immigrant than

their predecessors, and they work in closer alliance on many issues with a range of other

civil rights organizations. The same day that the State Legislators for Legal Immigration

introduced their two model bills, Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership

Conference on Human and Civil Rights, announced his association would act in concert

with the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and immigrant groups to defeat what

he described as efforts to “create two tiers of citizens, a modern-day caste system.”61

Latinos can expect to benefit from their membership in what Desmond King and I have

termed the “race-conscious policy alliance” in American politics, and though it is not

nearly so politically potent as its “color-blind policy” counterpart, it still poses a major

obstacle to efforts to adopt measures hostile to, especially, immigrants who appear to be

objects of racial and ethnic animosities.62

Despite mounting concerns over Mexican immigration, many officials in national,

state, and local government agencies also still favor policies welcoming immigrants,

strengthening immigrant rights, and facilitating many of the forms of cultural recognition

that Mexican Americans seek. Over 50 state and local governments, for example, passed

resolutions opposing Arizona’s SB 1070.63 One reason is that, as a result of modern

immigration policies and also anti-immigrant movements that have sparked heightened

rates of naturalization and voting, Latinos represent the fastest-growing sector of the U.S.

electorate, and they are increasingly being elected to local, state, and national offices.64

Though they differ on many issues, most Latinos oppose most policies hostile to Mexican

29

immigrants and to aspirations to gain or maintain various forms of dual citizenship.65

Political leaders ignore these positions at their partisan peril.

And as Janice Fine and Daniel Tichenor have argued, though the American labor

movement continues its longstanding internal struggles over immigration issues,

particularly in regard to guest worker programs, today labor overall is far more pro-

immigration and pro-immigrant rights than ever before. Most unions recognize that the

labor movement in the U.S. and internationally needs to recruit service industry workers

who are often immigrants; and few modern labor leaders wish to distance themselves

from modern civil rights causes. As a result, rather than “a clear-cut division between

restriction versus solidarity within organized labor,” today all sides in labor debates over

immigration endorse “solidarity” and champion “immigrant rights.” The fights now are

simply over “the best strategy to defend labor standards while welcoming new immigrant

workers as the lifeblood of a revitalized labor movement.”66 In that context, Mexican

Americans and Mexican immigrants can usually find labor allies at local, state, and

national levels.

Finally and perhaps most fundamentally for the political prospects of immigration

reform, many influential American employers and economic conservatives continue to

regard relatively unrestricted Mexican labor as economically valuable, perhaps

indispensable. 67 Their power, which obviously remains substantial in American politics,

is probably the chief reason why national policies sharply restrictive of such immigration

have not been enacted. Despite the current anti-immigrant and especially anti-Mexican

fervor, it is therefore not inconceivable that a potent coalition could be built in favor of

restructured immigration policies that would give greater priority to legal admissions of

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Mexicans, perhaps even including Mexicans currently working in the United States

without legal authorization but also without any other history of illegal conduct. The

construction of such a coalition would surely be aided by challenges to prevalent notions

of Mexican immigrants as undeserving intruders, and by political efforts to foster

acceptance that the United States has some special obligations to Mexicans and Mexican

Americans—obligations that exceed U.S. obligations to many other immigrants whose

identities and aspirations have been much less shaped by America’s coercive policies.

The burden of this essay has been to show that there is much to be said in favor of

recognizing such obligations.

1 The reference is to the song “Living in the Promiseland,” a #1 country hit that Texan Willie Nelson sang and produced in 1986, the same year Congress enacted its last major (unsuccessful) effort at comprehensive immigration reform legislation, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). The song, written by Arkansas songwriter David Lynn Jones, has its first two verses: Give Us Your Tired And Weak And We Will Make Them Strong Bring Us Your Foreign Songs And We Will Sing Along Leave Us Your Broken Dreams We'll Give Them Time To Mend There's Still A Lot Of Love Living In The Promiseland Living In The Promiseland Our Dreams Are Made Of Steel The Prayer Of Every Man Is To Know How Freedom Feels There Is A Winding Road Across The Shifting Sand And Room For Everyone Living In The Promiseland Http://www.lyrics007.com/Willie%20Nelson%20Lyrics/Living%20In%20The%20Promiseland%20Lyrics.html.

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2 These numbers are calculated from data for 2008 provided by the Migration Policy Institute at http://www.migrationinformation/datahub/countrydata/country.cfm and from Jeffrey S. Passel, Randy Capps, and Michael Fix, UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS: FACTS AND FIGURES, Urban Institute Immigration Studies Program, January 12, 2004, p. 1, at http://www.urban.org/publications/1000587.html. 3 Rogers M. Smith, “Constitutional Democracies, Coercion, and Obligations to Include,” in Jeffrey K. Tulis and Stephen Macedo, eds. The Limits of Constitutional Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010), 280-296. An earlier online formulation is “The Principle of Constituted Identities and the Obligation to Include,” Ethics & Global Politics 1: 139-153 (2008). 4 Smith, “Constitutional Democracies,” ibid. 295. 5 The text of the bill can be found at http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1070s.pdf. 6 William Booth, “Mexican Officials Condemn Arizona’s Tough New Immigration Law,” Washington Post, April 27, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/26/AR2010042603810. 7 Randal C. Archibald, “Judge Blocks Arizona’s Immigration Law,” New York Times, July 28, 2010. 8 “SB 1070 Appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,” http://www.messinglawoffices.com/SB_1070_on_appeal_9th_cir.aspx 9 The full text of the bill is at http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf. 10 Nicole Santa Cruz, “Arizona bill targeting ethnic studies signed into law,” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/12/nation/la-na-ethnic-studies-20100512; Michael Martinez, “Arizona education chief moves to ban ethnic studies in Tucson Schools,” http://articles.cnn.com/2011-01-04/us/arizona.ethnic.studies.ban_1_arizona-schools-superintendent-ethnic-studies-tucson-program?_s=PM:US. 11 Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: the Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 244-245; Nicole Santa Cruz, “Arizona has rarely invoked its last tough immigration law,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/19/nation/la-na-employer-sanctions19-2010apr19. 12 Devin Dwyer and Jonathan Karl, “Republicans Eye Change to Birthright Citizenship,” ABC News, August 3, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/birthright-citizenship-14th-amendment-republican-senators-explore-change/story?id=11313973; “14th Amendment,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 9, 2010, http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/50245483-82/citizenship-amendment-birthright-born.html.csp; Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship without Consent: The Illegal Alien in the American Polity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 13 Julia Preston, “State Lawmakers Outline Plans to End Birthright Citizenship, Drawing Outcry,” New York Times, January 6, 2011, A16. 14 Paula Gutierrez, “Mexico’s Dual Nationality Amendments: They Do Not Undermine U.S. Citizens’ Allegiance and Loyalty or U.S. Political Sovereignty,” Loyola of Los Angeles International & Comparative Law Journal 19: 1008-1015 (1997). 15 Jesús Martínez Saldaña, “The Political Rights of Mexican Migrants: Opportunities and Challenges,” paper presented at the Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for

32

Scholars, November 2005, at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/news/docs/martinezenglishfinal.pdf. 16 Mario García, “La Frontera: The Border as Symbol and Reality in Mexican-American Thought,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 1: 195-225 (1985), 197. Around the same time, political scientist John A. Garcia used survey data to argue: “Mexican immigrants usually possess multiple concepts of self identities (i.e., ethnic identity, U.S. national chauvinism, etc.) which can serve to bridge regional and ethnic diversity within ‘the centripetal forces’ of central authority” (John. A. Garcia, “The Political Integration of Mexican Immigrants: Examining Some Political Orientations,” International Migration Review 21: 373-374 [1987]). 17 García, “La Frontera,” ibid. 198-201. 18 Ibid. 212. 19 Ibid. 213. 20 Ibid. 216, 220, 223. 21 Leo R. Chavez, “The Power of the Imagined Community: The Settlement of Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States,” American Anthropologist 96: 68 (1994). 22 Leo R. Chavez, Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society, 2d ed. (United States: Wadsworth Thomson Learning Inc.), 42. 23 William V. Flores, “New Citizens, New Rights: Undocumented Immigrants and Latino Cultural Citizenship,” Latin American Perspectives 30: 96-97 (2003). For a nuanced discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of this and related perspectives, see Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 24 Flores, ibid. In Latino Political Power (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005), Kim Geron argues similarly that Latino elected officials tend to be liberals concerned to promote economic and educational opportunities for all the less advantaged, but with special concerns to aid their Latino constituencies, including support for ethnic studies programs (198-214). In Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), Peter Skerry also identified these priorities, though he expressed concern that Mexican American leaders were failing their constituents by emphasizing too strongly a civil-rights era “racial minority” agenda of grievances. 25 Luis Ricardo Fraga, John A. Garcia, Rodney E. Hero, Michael Jones-Correa, Valerie Martinez-Evers, and Gary M. Segura, Latino Lives in America; Making It Home (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 181, 187-188. 26 Ibid. 185. 27 See e.g. Beltrán, op. cit.; Rodolfo O. De La Garza, Marisa A. Abrajano, and Jeronimo Cortina, “Get Me to the Polls on Time: Coethnic Mobilization and Latino Turnout,” in Jane Junn and Kerry L. Haynie, eds. New Race Politics in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 95-113; Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto and Jennifer L. Merolla, “Se Habla Espanol: Ethnic Campaign Strategies and Latino Voting Behavior,” Junn and Haynie, New Race Politics in America, 114-129. 28 Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 30-39, 470-488; Stories of Peoplehood: The

33

Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 29 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 82-83. 30 Smith, Stories, op cit. 72-125. 31 I believe these responsibilities are greater when governments have coerced persons, rather than simply affected them in ways they might have avoided or resisted without fear of any kind of direct governmental punishment. But I do not defend that position here. For discussion see Smith, “Constitutional Democracies,” op. cit., 282-284. For distinct but related arguments from which I have benefited, see Lea Ypi, Robert E. Goodin, and Christian Barry, “Associative Duties, Global Justice, and the Colonies,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37: 104-13 (2009); Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory 36: 37-65 (2008); Robert E. Goodin, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 35: 40-68 (2007); Rainer Bauböck, “Political Boundaries in a Multilevel Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranović, eds., Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 85-109. 32 Like many others, Thomas Pogge doubts that “historical arguments” have “much relevance” to present issues (Thomas W. Pogge, “Accommodation Rights for Hispanics in the United States,” in Will Kymlicka and Alan Paten, eds. Language Rights and Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 105-106. In regard to language rights for Hispanics, Pogge proposes instead a “Fundamental Principle of Public Education” holding that “the best education for each child is the education that is best for this child” (118). But it is questionable whether what is “best for a child can be answered without some attention to how they have come to be who they are, with certain values and goals. If what is “best” for the child includes fulfillment of the cultural aspirations and realization of the identities that result partly from their coercive constitution by a government, then Pogge’s principle requires an education that accommodates those aspirations and identities, just as the principle of coercively constituted identities does. 33 Smith, Civic Ideals, op. cit., 205-06. 34 See e.g. Gregory Rodriguez, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 89-92, 98-99; Lisa García Bedolla, Latino Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 36-39. 35 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 51. 36 García Bedolla, op. cit., 42. 37 Meeks, op. cit., 4. 38 García Bedolla, op. cit., 44-45. 39 Ibid. 46-48; Meeks, op. cit., 31, 36; Rodriguez, op. cit., 129-130; Jules Davids, American Political and Economic Penetration of Mexico, 1877-1920 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 173, 180, 186-189. 40 García Bedolla, ibid. 47-51; Meeks, ibid. 73-75; Rodriguez, ibid. 131-36. 41 Smith, Civic Ideals, 346-469. 42 Meeks, op. cit., 38, 42.

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43 On the relationship of doctrines of Anglo-Saxon superiority to imperialism, domestic racial policies, and judicial decisions in the late 19th and early 20th century, see Smith, Civic Ideals, op. cit., 411-424, 429-453. 44 García Bedolla, op. cit., 51-63; Rodriguez, op. cit., 159-178; Meeks, op. cit. 109-117. 45 García Bedolla, ibid., 52-53; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 173-174; Zaragosa Vargas, Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 220, 263-298. 46 Vargas, ibid.; Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 173-197. 47 García Bedolla, op. cit., 63-92; Rodriguez, op. cit., 201-261; Meeks, op. cit., 180-210. 48 García Bedolla, ibid. 52-53; Tichenor, op. cit., 203-211. 49 Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 382-383. 50 Ibid. 392. 51 Ibid. 393; Bill Ong Hing, Ethical Borders: NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 7-28. 52 Zolberg, op. cit., 385, 387-388. 53 See bill at http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/96-499.htm. 54 In fact, PRWORA originally made even many immigrants present at the time of its enactment ineligible for SSI and food stamps, but Congress restored eligibility to most pre-enactment immigrants via the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, the 1998 Agricultural Research Extension and Education Act and the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002. The states have chosen to provide TANF and Medicaid benefits to most pre-enactment immigrants (Audrey Singer, “Welfare Reform and Immigrants: A Policy Review,” 2004, 23, 27-28, at http://www.brookings.edu/Urban/pubs/200405_singer.pdf). 55 See summary at http://uscis.gov/graphics/shared/aboutus/statistics/LegisHist/act142.htm. 56 U.S. Immigration Numerical Limits and Caps,” http://immigrationroad.com/resource/immigrant-visa-annual-limit-and-cap.php. 57 Peter J. Spiro, Beyond Citizenship: American Identity after Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 68-69. 58 Irene Bloemraad, Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in Canada and the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). 59 Ibid. 118-126. 60 “Immigration 2009” at http://www.nae.net/resolutions/347-immigration-2009. 61 Preston, “State Lawmakers,” op. cit. 62 Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 63 “State and Local Leaders for Immigration Reform,” http://act.reformimmigrationforamerica.org/cms/sign/elected_officials/. 64 Fraga et al., op. cit., 4-8. 65 Douglas S. Massey and Magaly Sánchez R., Brokered Boundaries: Creating Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010), 79-80.

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66 Janice Fine and Daniel J. Tichenor, “A Movement Wrestling: American Labor’s Enduring Struggle with Immigration, 1866-2007,” Studies in American Political Development 23: 110 (2009). See more generally Leah Haus, Unions, Immigration, and Internationalization: New Challenges and Changing Coalitions in the United States and France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 67 Julia Preston, “Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration,” New York Times, July 6, 2008, A1.